Post edited 1:36 am – December 3, 2009 by Simon C

Hi all,

Here's the first couple of chapters of my game “On Mighty Thews”.  This is my first attempt at “proper” layout.  I'd appreciate feedback on this aspect of it. 

That's a good question.  This has been a free product in the past, and now I'm thinking about making it a for-pay thing.  I haven't really thought about print formats. 

I guess what I'm looking for from this is a pdf that reads ok on the screen and looks nice when you print it out on A4.

But if I want to print this I'll have to change the layout a lot.  What's a good print format for 30ish pages?

I think Vincent's kinda right about your title font. It's heavy in a bank kind of way, not an overbearing barbarian kind of way.

Vincent's right: at 30 pages, you won't have a spine. Even if you managed to get it perfect bound at that thickness, it's too narrow to print on meaningfully.

Here's why that matters:

When you sell someone a game book, you're competing twice. First, you're competing at retail. For retail online, people only see the front cover and read your blurb. For bookstores, you get shoved in vertically and, if your book is saddle stitched, it totally disappears. So, bookstores are your first place where you need a spine, at the very least.

The other place is your home bookshelf. When you're sitting down with your friends and saying, "What should we play tonight?" you're going to answer with the games you can see, and always see when you walk by.

If you have a copy of The Mountain Witch, look at its cover. I asked for those stripes to cross the spine. Notice how the stripe wraps around the spine of Shock: and how the Bliss Stage spine makes this alarming chevron. These are really deliberate and important for me.

(And that's why Vincent should pack Mechaton in boxes with mecha.)

You might not have that option. But it's an important thing to consider.

If I were you, I'd print landscape, then have printing done on A2 (cut in half of course). It'll make the book stick out the edge, plus you'll get these wide, multi-column pages. And you'll be able to read it easily on horizontal computer screens.

The title font isn't my ideal choice, just the best I could find at the time.  I like the small caps, but that's about it.  Can someone suggest a good place to look for something better, and some qualities to look for?

What do you want the cover to convey?

Joshua, I'm only half following what you mean, because I'm pretty new to this layout thing.  I'm not really clear on the terminology.

Sorry about that. Let's see if I can make more sense this time:

Do you mean each page, as I'd see it on my computer laying it out, should be a landscape A2 sheet with two of my current A4 pages on it?

Fortunately, no. You're right to ask.

No, I mean that each A4 page goes all the way across a screen. To do that, the page needs to be horizontal. That's also an unusual format and might give some "big, weird fantasy land" look to the book. It'll also be easier to keep open on the table.

But that means that, if you're saddle stapling, you need a piece of paper that's twice as long the long way as A4. Because metric paper (like metric everything else) makes so much sense with its √2 proportions, you can make it twice as big in either direction and get the same size final either way. There's no analog for our stupid-ass paper sizes, far as I know.

Just look at this stupid shit.

Here are A sizes.See how they paper's the same shape, no matter how big it is? That's because they used math.

Now read about the arbitrary ANSI sizes. See how only two have names? And see how Legal isn't listed? It's because the sizes have nothing to do with anything. You can't get the same shape paper in different sizes without just cutting up the paper. They used arbitrary traditions.

What I'm getting at is that you can (at least in theory — check with several printers) have your stuff printed in saddle-stitched landscape because someone used math. And your government decided that math was probably a better basis for the size of something than something that felt good because it was familiar.

Then printing for saddle-stapling I'd have to change the order of the pages completely, right?

Don't worry about that. Any printer knows how to do that. That's called, for some reason, impression. If your printer asks you to do impression for them, fire them just as fast as you can and go to someone else. That's a sign of gross incompetence. And I say that because I've seen it born out with horrible, expensive, publisher-embarassing results.

Post edited 10:28 pm – December 7, 2009 by joshua
Post edited 10:30 pm – December 7, 2009 by joshua
Post edited 10:37 pm – December 7, 2009 by joshua

NOW we're talking.

OK, let's look at that cover. I'll tell you what I see. You tell me what you see.

• Really good Frazetta art.
• Abominably racist overtoes, as one could safely assume.
• A full bleed image — it goes all the way to (and past, both technically and cognitively) the edges of the paper. 
  • Some really interesting geometry:
    
    • Note the X from the corners (blue). It goes through one ape-man's face, through Jongor's massive, hairless, sausagely-packed chest, through another ape-man's face, into the corner.
    • Curiously, the counterpart ape-man being flung, also in line with his chest and the counterpart stepped-on ape-man doesn't line up with the corner. This might be a printing-level decision, not Frazetta's. Or he could be playing with a subtle asymmetry, which is likely. The other corner-to-corner goes right through the guy's face, though, which doesn't seem like a coincidence.
    • The pentagon, resting on a corner. Man, this is good stuff. From the two flung ape-men, to another coming up to grapple our well-oiled hero from behind, to another with some sort of ass ornament, to a woman with alluringly muscled arms and an alluringly unmuscled chest stuffed into a bustier.
      • Shapes resting on their corners are dynamic and unstable. They literally make the audience look at it and say, “Uh oh! This requires action right away!” You want to do that, too! Use pointy shapes pointing pointingly at things you want! Watch where eyes point. Watch the shapes that characters make. Make sure it's saying, “Whoa! Something's happening! This requires action right away!”
      • Note that the Penguin, the 60¢, the MIGHTY ARCHER text, and the title all stick aroun the big X.

Try your cover art with this stuff in mind. I'd also suggest looking for some Art Nouveau fonts for your cover. The font world is crammed with them.

Post edited 11:48 pm – December 7, 2009 by Simon C

Thanks Joshua,

That's really interesting, useful advice.  I think some of that is going to stretch my technical and artistic abilities, but it's good stuff to know.

I'm looking at those other covers on the same page and seeing some of the same elements, as well as differences.

This is going to be like studying gender theory, isn't it? You can't un-see it.

Ok, so I mocked up a cover using a picture from Illodeli.  I haven't bought the rights to it yet though, so I feel a bit weird about posting it here.  Is that a bad thing to do?

It's in A5 size, portrait. 

What would I have to do to my current layout to make it suitable for printing as a saddle-stapled booklet?

Post edited 6:34 am – December 14, 2009 by Simon C
Post edited 6:35 am – December 14, 2009 by Simon C
Post edited 6:38 am – December 14, 2009 by Simon C

Ok, here's my cover mock-up:

So I'm pretty happy with this, as it goes. 

I kind of feel like, given the racist and sexist history of the genre, having a white dude on the cover is a bit of a missed opportunity though.  Funnily enough there's a scarcity of pictures of heroic women in clothes.

Maybe I should just suck it up and commission something?

I tried a few different things for the interior as well.  I really wanted a meaty slab-serif font, but finding one that doesn't immediately shout "wild west" is a challenge.

Ugh.

You just made me look at some really, really awful art. I hope you're happy.

Hm, OK. There's something about that tagline that seems static to me. You're talking about exciting stuff, though.

Do you want crit on this?